Episode 880 Scott Adams: Enjoy the Simultaneous Swaddle and DIY Ventilator Instructions

Hey, everybody, come on in. It's time for the simultaneous waddle. It's that time when you get to enjoy the unparalleled pleasure of feeling connected to people all over the world at the same time. Wrapped in a soft blanket, or just thinking about it, or just wishing you were wrapped in a soft blanket. Well, we got plenty of news. Lots of stuff to talk about. A lot of people are going to bring you the bad news about the coronavirus. And I figure that beats pretty well covered all the bad news. But. But is there no light at the end of the tunnel? Is there nothing that we can appreciate while we get through these tough times? Well, I think there are lots of things. One of the things that I would like to celebrate is human ingenuity. Quite, quite impressive, wouldn't you say, today? In fact, I tweeted an article, I retweeted an article that MIT came up with a design where you could make your own ventilator for parts that I guess are easily obtainable for $100. Now, who saw that coming? What's a real ventilator cost? Probably, I think it's over $10,000. It's pretty expensive, right? Somebody tell me in the comments, how much does a good ventilator cost? So when I saw that the geniuses at MIT had invented a do it yourself $100 ventilator, I thought, I'm going to make one of those. And I thought, I'm not going to be selfish and just sort of make it for myself. I want to also teach you how to make it. So trust me, this is easier than you think. So I'm going to teach you how to make $100, possibly less, because you'll be using materials that you could, obviously I think all of you have around your house. So this will be the first time I've tried this. But I'm confident a lot of people you don't know that I'm not just a cartoonist. I worked as an engineer for years at the phone company. And when I say I worked as an engineer, I mean it said engineer on my business card. I didn't have any actual training, but I worked near engineers and I had the same job title. And if you work near people long enough, you can pick up, you can get the vibe, right? You don't have to spend four years in college. Mit, you work near people, you pick up things. And so I started to assemble the parts and make sure that you're writing this down. There are not many parts to it, but write this down. So you want to look around your house and just use common household items. For example, grab your air hock. I know you have one of these. So this normally would be used for filling up a tire, to inflate a tire. But by itself, well, this would be a pretty poor ventilator by itself, right? Think we could agree. But then you want to take a tube that comes from your hydroponic garden that turned out to be a huge mistake. And you want to insert the tube. Now, watch this. Into the air hock, like that. And then the other tube is available. Now, this isn't the kind of thing that you want to just start using on an actual patient without a little testing. So you're going to need to run some kind of a clinical trial. I mean, safety first. So you're going to need one other thing. You need one of these. Now, I don't know exactly where you can get one of these. Probably Home Depot. I got mine in the backyard when I was digging a. Digging a little foundation for a shed. And I thought, you know, I might need it someday. So I thought, well, I'm not going to throw it away. And if you were going to throw it away, what bin would it go in? It's not exactly trash. You can't really recycle it. It's not lawn clippings. So I was kind of trapped. I wanted to discard it, But I'm also a good citizen, so I'm like, well, maybe I'll just reuse it someday. It's almost like a recycling thing. So anyway, you take the tube that's attached to the air hock, and that goes in here like that. Then you turn on the air hock, and then watch. Live, live, live. And then you remove the ventilator. Again, less than $100 in parts stuff that's. That's already in your home. Your patient has recovered, as you can see. You have to use a little bit of imagination here. It's not. I mean, I can't do everything for you. And you can see that the $100 ventilator was quite successful. Now, somebody suggesting duct tape. That's a fine upgrade. That's a good upgrade. All right, so president gave a press conference tonight. I rank it his best one. I would say number one. And, you know, of course, people have and will continue to mock me sometimes. With good. With good cause. Because when I say good things about the president, they say you only say good things about the president, no matter what he does. But that wouldn't be the case. Lately, I think most of you would agree I've been pretty, pretty brutal on his earliest, you know, some of his earlier communication. But I would have to say of all the Trump public things he's done, I mean, not counting rallies, they're their own category, but the, if you count, you know, press conferences, I would say this is his best one. Not just of the, not only of the pandemic situation, but the best of his presidency, I would say. And I think actually, clearly, I think it was actually just a clear best, best of class so far. So Good job there, Mr. President. I thought he had all the right notes, he had the right tone. I loved it when he fought with cnn. That's just part of the show somebody on Twitter said was mocking him, and by extension me, was mocking the President for bragging about his ratings for his press conferences. And I guess the, the assumption was that it would be bad to be dealing with this catastrophe, but also in the same breath, saying that your ratings are really good. And I thought to myself, what kind of an artist are you? Because in my world, one of the most important functions of the government, and certainly of the President, is to inform the public to tell us what to do, what's coming up. And, you know, and you can argue in the details about some little stuff, you know, the details were wrong, that to be corrected. I don't think any of that's going to matter in the long run. But I'll tell you what does matter. What matters a lot is that the citizens feel that they really have some connection to its government. And the government is doing lots of stuff which the citizens don't know is the right thing, the wrong thing, the right time, we don't really know. But we like to feel connected to something that's happening, because just being connected to it, hearing about it, learning about it, figuring out what we're supposed to do, knowing what to expect and all that stuff is super important. So what would be more important than having good ratings? The way the President does it is always more interesting and provocative than someone else would do it. But should he not? Is this going too far? I mean, is this too much of a cheerleader for the President to say that it's absolutely functionally superior to have more people watching him inform the country what to think and what to know and, you know, not what to think exactly, but you know, what to, you know, what we need to know, that they know that sort of thing? What can be better than having a big audience? It's crazy. So, I mean, he nails it on that. That's probably the strongest thing he does that nobody will ever be able to equal. In the history of future presidents, I doubt there'll ever be one who can command attention the way this one can and see if you have the same response that I did. So today the President was showcasing a number of, I guess, CEOs of big companies that were being especially helpful for the pandemic. So there was CEO of UPS and CEO of this and that hospital and whatever. And so some of the CEOs got to say their little piece first at a table. It was an earlier setting where they were sitting around a table, but with some good distance. And then later when he was at the podium, some of them would come up and say a few words. And I was really struck by how little charisma these top level CEOs have compared to Trump. If you have it to play it back or anything, just look for that. Just look at the, the raw wattage of the CEOs just as a charisma scale. Forget about whether you like him or don't like him. I'm just saying pure interesting charisma. And then you watch the president come on and like the, you know, the stadium lights come on and he's just, it's just like a billion watts brighter than these guys who are top CEOs in the whole country. And I'm not saying this is any kind of an insult to the CEOs because they didn't get their jobs by being bad at what they do. Obviously, I assume that all those CEOs are just the top level kinds of performers or they wouldn't be in that situation. But even they kind of disappeared a little bit when Trump was in the same zip code. I don't think people quite understand how good he is. History is going to be so kind to him if nothing worse happens, assuming that he doesn't break anything in the future, if all that happens is we get past this and get back to something kind of normal, he will be judged so well by how well he captured the audience and got our attention. At least for that stuff anyway. At this moment, the death toll from the coronavirus is negative, meaning more people are alive because of it. Now, I'm not saying that's going to stay that way, but it is a fact that the actual natural deaths that we would have had from car accidents and such is actually been studied. Now there's enough data that we can look at and say, well, how did we do for accidental deaths that week? And I think they're down like 5 to 10,000. So since the lockdown got serious, something between 5 and 10,000 people are alive that would have otherwise been dead. Now, the cost of that is a little over, I think. I think it's crossed 2000 people have died so far. Now you can't compare because the coronavirus is far from done, right? So we don't know what that number grows to. And that's the only thing that matters in the long run. But will we save another 5 or 10,000 lives next week? I'm not sure if it was a one or two week period, whatever it was, but certainly we're going to be in lockdown some more. So wouldn't you therefore conclude that we will get whatever we saved before would probably continue. So we might save 15 to 30,000 lives. I mean, at great cost, of course, because people are dying of coronavirus, the economy's taking a hit. So at great cost. But you have to add all the costs of the benefits. If you're actually going to have a, an adult opinion about things, you have to say this counts because it's all the same decision. It caused these side benefits, those have to be in the calculation. So I'm gonna, I'd like to go on record as being the most optimistic person who also thinks that the coronavirus is super deadly. There, there are people more optimistic than me who never thought the coronavirus was going to be worse than the flu. So I'm not counting them. They can have a competition within their own category. I would like to be the biggest optimist in the category. People who also think it's exactly the same pandemic that the experts think that the top side worst case actually is somewhere in the general vicinity of what the experts say. So I believe that to be true. I don't know it to be true, but we're all kind of guessing, aren't we? I don't know it to be true. How could you? But you know, my years on this earth, you know, whatever brain cells I have have converged on that opinion fairly strongly that the downside risk is pretty tremendous if this got out of hand. So I believe that we have several ways out and that if we can hold on as the president has now moved the target date, if we can hold on to the new target date, we'll either have a lot more supply of things we need, include masks, tests, ventilators, we might have more convalescent serum, we might, maybe we'll have DNA tests. We're probably getting better at social distancing. So there's a whole bunch of stuff that can happen between now and the new deadline, which is April 30, I believe. So April 30 is sort of the new expect to be locked down until then date. But of course, everything is flexible based on changing data. Now, I would like to update something that I said earlier. So before the President had ever picked a date and before he had ever said let's shoot for Easter, I had said he should give us a date even if it's wrong, even if it's revised because you'll feel better and it won't change what we do because they'll always have the ability to revise anytime they want. But you just feel better if your government said, well, we don't know, but we're going to shoot for this. So that was the Easter date. Almost immediately, some of the experts were saying, well, you know, that's sort of aspirational, which is a word the President used today. And when he revised it, he talked about talking to all of his experts, considering all the options. You know, I think the public, and this is something he did really well, I think the public really thought he wanted to get back to work soon. So the fact that you knew that was his bias, and then he described talking to the experts and then coming to this decision, which is very much different from where you knew his bias was. So that gives you actually some confidence because you can see the range of his flexible thought and that it landed compatible with the experts. Now are the experts right? Who knows? I think in this case they're the smart bat, at least in terms of sizing the thing and guiding us towards solutions. But my point is the next several weeks will get us to probably have way more tests than masks and hydrochloroquine and test results and stuff. So when we go hard at it, we're going to be pretty well equipped. So given all that and the fact that I think the hydrochloroquine is sort of already working, am I right? So my understanding is that if you get the hydroxychloroquine, if you get it sort of soon after you get symptoms, your odds of never needing a ventilator are really good. But if they don't give it to you until you're sort of on or near the ventilator, it still can work pretty well, but it's not the magic that it would be if you got it early. So what should you expect if that's actually true, versus just my anecdotal hallucinations, which it could be right. We could all be hallucinating that there's evidence for this, but it's really just anecdotal. So what you would expect to see is that the number of deaths would start to level off at the same time the number of infections was skyrocketing. And I think you're going to start to see that. I think maybe you've already seen the first signal of that, but you have to wait a few days to see if it's just noise, I guess, or coincidence. But that's what to look for. And I would expect to see that. So if the hydroxychloroquine works, as we suspect, we could get the death rate down below the point that even though it could be a few tens of thousands of people, we could actually get it below the point if you net, you know, the people who didn't die because they're not on the road this week with drunk drivers, you know, for that same time period. So my, my optimistic projection is that the net, all things considered, will be under 5,000, 5,000 deaths. Now, that's not anywhere near what any expert saying. And by the way, I'm even calculating, you know, just not with any science behind it. But I'm assuming, in my opinion, I'm not forgetting any deaths from extra poverty, from the, you know, the economic dislocation. So I'm going to be the super optimist on this with the understanding, you should know in advance that almost nobody who knows what they're talking about thinks it will be this good. I'm kind of alone on this, but that's what makes it fun, right? Have you ever seen me make a prediction in which I was completely alone and then it turned out, well, some of you have. All right, I couldn't believe that Trump called out New York City. Not necessarily the government, but apparently a lot of masks have been shipped to New York City, but they seem to be maybe disappearing. Now, that's not. And I mean by disappearing, I mean stolen. And now that's not confirmed. But what's interesting about this is that Trump, I think Trump has a really good sort of BS detector, you know, a crime detector. You know, say what you will about him, but don't you think he can sniff a, you know, sniff out a, you know, a little impropriety? Like, he would be good at that, don't you think? Especially if it had to do with New York City and, let's say the. The underworld connection to moving goods back and forth in New York City. So if Trump looked at those numbers and said, maybe those numbers are real. But I really think the press ought to look into this because it doesn't look real to me. It looks like something's falling off the back of trucks. And I don't think I could have loved more the fact that he put that out there even without proof, because I don't know, if I had to put odds on it, 70% chance he's right. Wouldn't you say that's worth looking into? If you had to guess, is Trump right, that there is massive criminal activity going around these, you know, these so valuable masks, wouldn't you kind of assume there must be, especially in this environment and the fact that it's probably easy to get away with it. Yeah, I think Trump knows he just might smell it from 10 states away. And you might be right. Let's see what else we got going on here. So the experts were predicting zero to no. What was it, from 0 to 2 million or 20. No, 20,000 to 2 million or something. 200,000 to 2 million. Some gigantic number. I hope not. Here's an idea. So Bill Ackman, hedge fund guy, sometimes not that popular in some circles, if you're on the other end of a trade and you lost money, you don't like him. But he tweets this. And I don't think he's some big friend to the President, but this was a productive idea no matter who you are. So listen to this. So Bill Ackman says, Mr. President, in his tweet, why don't you launch the biggest infrastructure program of all time now. Roads, bridges and other infrastructure involving outdoor work. Pretty clever, huh? That allows for social distancing. That's not bad. He says doing so will put Americans back to work now in good paying, virus safe jobs. And you know, I have to say, like, why did I think of that? You know, you hear that idea and the first thing you think of is, why didn't somebody already say that? Did nobody say that before? I didn't think of it. But what would be a better time to do the biggest bipartisan infrastructure bill of all time? Seriously, what would be the better time to get a bipartisan, enormous infrastructure bill and just put masses of people back to work outdoors? It's kind of brilliant. If I'm being honest. There's nothing wrong with that idea. Right? Okay. Of course, with all this big news, CNN decided that the thing they would focus on is that when the President was sparring with a member of the press, he referred to her as part of a Group, meaning the press that he doesn't like as you people, which was immediately interpreted as what? What was that interpret? That's right. Yes, it was interpreted as racist. So that's what CNN decided to focus on. So you got that I would like to read to you before I take your questions, a tweet thread that might make you feel better. So some of you already saw this, but I think it's worth reading it to you again. And it goes like the coronavirus is acting like an unwelcome Olympics for scientists, doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs, techies, leaders, parents, and ordinary heroes of every kind, setting records in every event. You can almost feel humanity getting smarter. The most capable among us are forming lasting connections, sharing best practices, learning shortcuts, building a working trust, creating tools at blazing speeds. One way to imagine the future is that the economy will lose trillions of dollars and we'll never get it back. Another filter in the future is that energy doesn't disappear. It only relocates and changes form. A huge amount of energy is leaving the economy. We know that for sure. What is less clear is where that energy is going. My filter shows a global mind being formed in real time to fight our common enemy, the virus. That mind needs a lot of energy, like a newborn. And wow, is it getting it. I had resisted the common pundit prediction that everything would be different after this crisis because I expect a speedy recovery. But I revised my opinion. While I still expect a speedy recovery, I also think this experience is rewiring the. Rewiring the collective mind of civilization. We probably crammed years of innovation into months. We'll be coming out of this with a lot of extra knowledge about our systems and about ourselves. That energy will get channeled back into the economy. The coming weeks will test us all, but when it is over, we will be far smarter and far tougher in every way. As Steve Jobs proved, the right thoughts and the right skill stack can turn into trillions of dollars. Civilization's skill stack is undergoing a major upgrade. Watch how much energy that later pumps into the economy. It will be amazing. So that's my positive thoughts for the day. If any of you have any. Sorry, I couldn't quite hear you. Could you please repeat? If any of you have a question, I would be happy to take a shot at it. All right. Yeah, that was a tweet thread that I wrote earlier today, so it's pinned to my. Pinned to my Twitter feed if you want to see it. And yes, somebody says the energy released thanks to deregulation. Yeah, one wonders if you can put that genie back in the bottle so easily that we all kind of witnessed something incredible, which is what humans can do if friction is removed. Friction in terms of government requirements. Now of course that's dangerous, but it was pretty amazing. And we were right in the middle of it. And watching it is, it's sort of a. It's a privilege to be able to watch this, this degree of human capability coming together at this time. What does the ideal government look like? Well, I think we might be evolving into it, oddly enough. Here's what I mean when I talk about the energy that's being taken out of the economy and then stored into the global mind. Imagine, if you will, that before this crisis that people were sort of like independent islands. Each person just think of them as an island. Just visualize this. And some of those islands had bridges connecting them. So now in your mind, connect a few of the islands to each other, but make sure not all of the islands are connected to all the other islands. They're just, you know, you can get from every island to every other island, but maybe you have to do a two hop or something. But what this crisis did is it took those existing islands and suddenly everybody could talk to other people. And they did. And they did it easily because of the Internet. It was. We formed these connections instantly that didn't exist before. So there were a whole bunch of bridges that just went springing out from each island so that everybody now was only one jump away from everybody else. You didn't have to do it too hop to get to anybody. You could pick up a phone, you could send a message, you could DM and you were talking to anybody in the world, and if they needed you and you needed them and you recognized that you connected immediately and that. And if you visualize that those islands first with just a few bridges, but enough to get from anywhere to anywhere, and then suddenly bridges from every island in every direction, that's where all the energy went. So all the energy that we had been putting into the economy, we suddenly just turned in the same direction as one, following our leaders who were pointing us at the common enemy, the virus. And over several weeks, we've taken all of that energy that would have otherwise been put into the various parts of the economy, focused on this one incredibly important task. And something amazing is happening. And I think that because we formed this global mind, if you will, after we beat the virus, those connections, not every one of them, but many of them will remain. And we'll have a. We'll have a let's say a shared civilization, memory of what worked and what didn't. We'll all see a whole bunch of rapid models and tests. We'll see how a B testing works. We're all going to be better decision makers because one of the weird things is this has been like a Harvard Business case and how to make decisions with inadequate information. That's changing all the time and lots of interests and lots of variables. And because it's such a shared experience, we all were engaged in the Harvard Business case. We all got to see all the variables. We all got to say, all right, if this were me, what would I do? How would I handle this? And so we all sort of learned almost like a college class in crisis management. If you think about it, it would take you a while to make a list. But if you thought about all the concepts that are really good ones, the things that you'll learn at the end of the cycle, because it's like taking. We're all at college, basically. We're learning a ton about how do you approach these situations? What do you do? How do you get ready? How do you assess risk? How do you manage risk? How do you balance things when these kinds of lives are at the risk versus these kind? How do you apply ingenuity to the problem versus money versus all those things? So I think we're going to come out of this with a global mind that's grown all these new neurons, that many of them will be permanent, and we will just know how to solve problems differently. We'll have maybe a different feeling about red tape. Maybe we won't tolerate it. Perhaps we'll have procedures that we do in good times and a set of procedures that immediately go into effect when there's a crisis. And at the very least, this situation has surfaced who. Who the leaders are and who the capable people are and who the people really you can depend on in a crunch. And I think some of that's permanent, too. There will be people within corporate America, probably people in government whose entire careers will be determined by how they get through the next several months. Just the way 911 made a Rudy Giuliani. This is not just New York, although they're getting hit hardest. This is all of us. So every mayor, every governor, every senator, every representative, every person on the task force, they're all on audition for a better job or more responsibility later. So if nothing else, we're going through the greatest talent filter our country has ever experienced. That's good. And I do think, even though I'm A bit of a cynic and a skeptic. I do think that some of what we're learning about being able to work together is going to last, not all of it. You know, there's going to be a lot of goodwill that's happening now because people understand there are higher priorities and then arguing about who, you know, politics, and most of that will go away. You know, as soon as we get back to normal, we just go back to being humans. We get a little tribal because we would have that luxury. But I don't think it's all going away. I think there's going to be a good solid 10% that is a lasting civilization memory that says, yeah, I'm arguing with you now, but when, you know, when the stuff goes down, you and I are going to be on the same team. I've always thought that that's why the United States and France, for example, will always be best buddies internationally, no matter how much we argue with them. And if you don't like them for this or their attitude or their policies, they're socialists, whatever. We might bicker like siblings forever, but the one thing that we sort of believe about each other, France and the United States, is that based on history, we would have each other's backs. That feels permanent, doesn't it? When was the last time, I mean, in your lifetime, when was the last time you had to have France's back, or France had to have our back in skirmishes in Iraq and stuff, but those were sort of over there. I'm not sure that was the case of anybody having anybody's backs. But, you know, we would, right? And part of the reason that we would like, you know, with 100% certainty, if you live in America, that if France were, you know, seriously threatened by an external threat, the next thing that France would hear is, could you step out of the way? Could you. We love that you want to fight this out on your own, but seriously, just step out of the way. Give us 10 minutes. And the United States would take care of business because we would always have France's back. And the reason we would is because they've had our back historically and vice versa. So that kind of feeling can last generations. And there might be, this is the hopeful part of me, there might be just a little bit of this experience when we get to the end of it that we just remember as a society, we just remember that we're capable, we're just capable of being on the same side when it's important. So that's the last thing that I'd like to leave with you. And now I'd like you to go off to a really good night's sleep. And I will see you in the morning. You know what time? Make sure you've got your simultaneous sipping beverage. Have a good night.